The Exquisite Awkwardness of the Final Few Minutes of Saturday Night Live
I hated high school. I hated everything about it. I’m not doing too well these days, but I take comfort in knowing I am not in high school.
But I particularly hated the part where my fellow students would congregate in front of the school before classes and talk to their friends. I had no friends, and the idea of talking to strangers filled me with fear. On a related note, talking to strangers still fills me with fear.
I hated how unstructured that part of school was. Every other element at least had some logic and structure to it, even something as awful, sadistic, and inhuman as having to dress and undress for a gym in the locker room.
I could not see the point of milling around the entrance of the high school talking to other students when you could be doing something like reading, listening to music, and assiduously avoiding eye contact.
Watching the final two minutes of Saturday Night Live takes me back to some of the most excruciating moments of my adolescence.
Everything about Saturday Night Live is scripted and rehearsed and tightly structured with the exception of the very end.
This is particularly true when the show ends two or three minutes early and it falls upon the host to fill that air time. That shouldn’t be difficult but no one ever seems to know what to do.
When called upon to say anything beyond, “I had a great time. I’d like to thank the cast and crew and the musical guest,” entertainers who are heralded as brilliant improvisers and quick wits suddenly turn into flopsweat-drenched amateurs.
Dick Cavett, for example, is a legendary wit, a peerless conversationalist, and a very smart man with a lot of anecdotes involving his close personal friend Groucho Marx.
Yet when called upon to improvise for two or three minutes when the show ends prematurely Cavett looked like he was on the verge of having a panic-induced heart attack.
I experience vicarious embarrassment watching hosts improvise poorly before the end credits. It brings me back to my awful high school days but also to Little League. After every game, you would line up and shake the hands of the other team while robotically intoning, “Good game,” whether the game was any damn good or not.
It was, like every aspect of my adolescence, excruciatingly awkward. I didn’t know what to do or say so I said the boilerplate bullshit you’re supposed to.
When the cast all come onstage at the end of Saturday Night Live there’s an element of that as well. I imagine that if you’re a Saturday Night Live cast member, there is a natural high to performing, to being in front of a live audience and the entire nation at home.
I imagine that it takes a while to come down from that high, which is one of the reasons that Saturday Night Live’s afterparties are legendary as well as infamous. After that natural high performers have traditionally sought out less natural ways of feeling good.
When the crowd gathers onstage their work is officially done. They’ve got Sunday off to nurse hangovers and recover from the previous week.
The awkward milling about at the end of the show consequently is the awkward in-between period where the show has more or less concluded but the celebrating has not quite begun.
Watching this weekly dead time, I analyze the body language and facial expressions of the cast, musical guest, and host. Does the cast hate the host? Do they avoid him or her like the plague or is it a love-fest all around?
Saturday Night Live often has cast members play fictionalized versions of themselves. As I’ve written on my website Any Episode Ever, Saturday Night Live is a show about television in general and itself in particular.
The Not Ready For Prime Time Players are being non-fictionalized versions of themselves at the end of the show. That seems to pose a much bigger challenge than acting in sketches or performing monologues.
I read that Dan Aykroyd in particular hated appearing as himself in any context and loved disappearing into outrageous characters.
It’s probably a good thing that I will never be a host or a cast member because then I’d have to mill about awkwardly at the end of the show and that would be torture.
As Principal Skinner understood, unstructured conversations are the absolute worst, so it’s incontrovertibly for the best that I am way too old and nowhere successful enough to do anything but write obsessively about Saturday Night Live for a tiny audience.
That’s one of the upsides to being a solitary writer. It doesn’t pay very well, and there’s no security or stability, but there’s also no milling around awkwardly, making painful small talk.
So, you know, I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
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